Subject: [Tournament Report] Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 17:53:31 -0500 From: "Aylesworth, Thomas H." To: "'fkusumot@ix.netcom.com'" My wife and I entered a small, local, non-DCI-sanctioned Type 2 tournament yesterday, so I thought I'd give a report of what we saw. Neither of us has had time to really play-test with Tempest much, so we decided to take some decks that had done well for us in the pre-Tempest environment and wouldn't need many changes for the new one. Unfortunately, her favorite deck (which had taken 2nd place in another small tournament a month ago) was devastated by the loss of Alliances. So she decided to play a variation of Stompy that I had put together mostly to play test against. I stuck with an Ertai-Tog deck that I've been playing for months and has always done well. It had started out as an all-black Buried Alive deck, but I never had much luck with that version, so I completely remade it as a 4CB deck. That version did MUCH better, but when I saw David Low posting about how popular Ertai-Tog was in Japan, I took out one color (green), added in the Ertais and put the Ghouls and Vultures back in from the Buried Alive version. This version did okay, but it wasn't until I replaced my Incinerates with Songs of Blood (thanks to a deck listing on the Dojo for the idea!) that I truly fell in love with the deck. No cards left this version of the deck when the Ice Age block went out, and the only change I decided to make was replacing my Skulking Ghosts with Dauthi Horrors, and experimenting with the Tempest depletion lands. Here's the deck I played: 3 Shadow Guildmage 3 Barrow Ghoul 2 Circling Vulture 4 Dauthi Horror 3 Cloud Elemental 4 Man-o'-War 4 Nekrataal 4 Ertai's Familiar 3 Ophidian 2 Necratog 4 Song of Blood 1 Kaervek's Torch 1 Kaervek's Spite 3 Undiscovered Paradise 1 Sulfurous Springs 1 Cinder Marsh 1 Underground River 2 Rootwater Depths 6 Island 8 Swamp As for the Stompy deck my wife played, it looked like this: 4 Llanowar Elves 4 Quirion Range 4 Rogue Elephant 4 Ghazban Ogre 4 Muscle Sliver 3 Whirling Dervish 2 Harvest Wurm 3 Jolrael's Centaur 2 Rootwalla 1 Apes of Rath 1 Lhurgoyf 4 Giant Growth 2 Elvish Fury 1 Eladamri's Vineyard 1 Nature's Resurgence 4 Winter Orb 16 Forest A quick word on the format this comic shop uses for their tournaments. They are double elimination with a "winner's bracket" and a "loser's bracket". First place prize goes to the winner of the winner's bracket and the second place prize goes to the winner of the loser's bracket. My wife took second place, losing in the winner's bracket only to the overall winner and easily beating the guy who beat me in the semi-finals of the loser's bracket. I'll only give a report of the matches I played (since I didn't watch Peggy's matches, obviously). There were ten people in the tournament, but only five (including me and Peggy) had what I would consider tournament-quality decks. Game 1: Played against Brian who brought a B/r weenie deck. I saw Ironclaw Orcs, Mogg Fanatics, Fallen Askari, Erg Raiders, Dauthi Horrors, and Fledgling Djinns pumped up with Blood Lusts and Unholy Strength. Goblin Bombardments and Funeral Charms were used as creature removal. His deck was fast and he was able to overwhelm me with creatures. It went to three games, but he won. He tried to cheer me up by telling me he had taken first or second place at that shop each of the past few weeks. But I wasn't happier until I got my revenge later in the loser's bracket. Game 2: Losing my first game actually gave me a slight advantage in that I was now playing the scrub decks. This was against one of the store employees playing with a deck that someone else had designed. It was G/U, with maybe some red splashed in for something. Apparently it was supposed to take advantage of Recycle somehow, but I never saw enough of it to really know. It had counters, power sinks, and lotus petals, but was just way too slow. I won 2/2 handily, and he was pretty mad at the guy who gave him the deck! Game 3: I played Dwayne who was attempting a 76 card, 5 color sliver deck. Uh-huh. Needless to say, I won without breaking a sweat. The only thing of interest that happened was that he brought out an Aether Flash and tried to tell me that when my Familiar phased back in, it would die. I told him that phasing didn't trigger comes-into-play effects, but neither he nor the bystanders had heard that. So I called the judge over, who also didn't know that! No one had a rulebook, so I bought a Mirage starter on the spot just to set the record straight. What a pain... Game 4: The scrubs were out of the way, but there was a misunderstanding about who I was supposed to play next. After Dwayne and I finished, I was told by someone that I played Russell next, but neither of us actually confirmed this with the organizer. So we played one game, which I won, before we were interrupted and I was told I was supposed to be playing Brian (from my first game) again, with Russell playing the winner of that match. So, we agreed that that game wouldn't count and I concentrated on beating the deck which I lost to earlier. It went three games again, but this time, I barely pulled it off in the only exciting match of the day. He had 12 life and I had 8, easily in the range for him to kill me the next turn. He had one blocker and I had a Dauthi Horror and a Man-O'-War on the table. I Man-O'-War'd his blocker away and cast Song of Blood, managing to mill 2 creatures, and attacked to take him down to 4. I brought out a Paradise, tapped all of my remaining lands for BBB, and sacrificed all of my permanents to play a Kaervek's Spite. He just sat there staring at the card for about a minute. Okay, it was luck on my part, but I didn't care: after the one game I had played against Russell, I was pretty sure this would make it so that I faced my wife for second place... Game 5: I played Russell, for real this time. He was playing a CounterBurn deck with four of each of the blue and red medallions and four Helms of Awakenings in order to abuse the buyback spells: Capsize, Searing Touch, and Whispers of the Muse. His counters included Counterspell, Dismiss, Disrupt, and Power Sink. His deck took a long time to develop, but when it did, it was devastating. The only thing I had to get rid of artifacts were three Disks in my sideboard. This time he got a god draw, bringing out 2 Helms and a few Medallions too fast for me to kill him in the first game, so he won. I sideboarded in the Disks (replacing the useless Nekrataals), but didn't need them: I won as easily as I'd won our other game. Game three, I never saw a disk and again he was able to get control, this time in a very long game: he had 3 life and I still had 20 when he finally got control by capsizing/searing torching my creatures and then hitting me with searing torch three times each turn after that to knock me out of the tournament. This enabled him to go against my wife, who had so far only lost in the finals of the winner's bracket. Her deck was far too fast for his, and she beat him in 6 turns the first game and 5 turns the second. His helms actually helped her empty her hand, and he had no mass destruction to punish her for doing so. So, the $15 in store credit partly made up for my having to buy the starter pack, and Peggy felt great about doing so well. When we talked about it later, I learned that the only deck that gave her any trouble was the overall winner. It was a burn deck with Furnace of Rath and the usual suspects: she remembered seeing Fireblasts, Incinerates, Disks, Kindles, Rolling Thunder, Earthquake, Disintegrate, and Jokulhaups. She rolled over all the other decks too fast to even get an idea of what they were playing. My impressions? Speed decks, either in the form of weenies or burn, are devastating. As Len Blado mentioned on the strategy list, all decks have to be prepared to take control by the 4th turn, or they will lose to something that can kill them on the 4th or 5th. The only control deck, the CounterBurn buyback deck I lost to, only did well, IMO, because almost no one was playing with much artifact removal. The answer to this, obviously, is play with artifact and enchantment removal! Still, it was an impressive deck that may be a contender. Oh, and red is still everywhere. Of the five good decks I saw, only Peggy's didn't have a red element. And, as I said, the overall winner was mono-red. So keep those Honorable Passages and Chills close at hand! If anyone has any suggestions on either of the decks I listed, they'd be much appreciated. In the Ertai-Tog deck, I think I'm going to replace the three Tempest depletion lands with Cities of Brass (after I pick some up) to speed it up a little and give me more consistent access to red mana. I'm also seriously considering Mana Severance to make my Songs of Blood even more dangerous. But what I really need is some enchantment/artifact removal: any ideas? If I do add the Cities, then I could probably throw in some Disenchants, but can anyone think of other options in the decks core colors? Cloudchaser Eagles are another possibility that fit the theme of the deck...although they're also white. Thomas Aylesworth